Painted Boots (9 page)

KyleKDTlovesyou

8:12AM(8 hours ago)

To me

Aspen
,

I’m glad you told me about stuff hitting your window. 
It’s upsetting, I’d be lying if I said different, but like so many things are, it is what it is.  If you found marbles, well, that’s classic Em.  She used to tell me all the time how marbles are handy when it comes to fear.  I know first-hand she’s scared plenty of people, rattling their windows in the dead of night.  I don’t like that she’s found your house, or your window, for that matter.  I don’t like that she’s taken to pestering you, especially with me being away.  Tell me how your school went.  So I know.

I’m puking sick of that girl.  She’s all I talked about today.  Dylan started with asking how I know her, which is from kindergarten, and was I attracted to her before we dated, which if we’re talking looks I was, and did I stay attracted when she started hurting me, which I didn’t.  Somewhere in the conversation I recognized how much I’d given up by staying in that relationship.  And I’ll tell you, even though it’s embarrassing.  When Em started hurting me I stopped feeling the way girls had always made me feel.  It was like I’d been neutered (though as you know, I’m not feeling that way anymore).  Em would get mad at me for something stupid, like not kissing her enough, and she’d churn her anger into a threat and with Em, threats always end up real.  I’d try to kiss her just to patch her mood, but it didn’t take, I guess because I couldn’t find what I needed in me to make my kiss real. How was I supposed to show affection I didn’t feel?  How can anyone be tender to the person beating on them?  But it became our pattern: I’d disappoint, she’d threaten, I’d try to please, she’d hurt me.

Right in the middle of saying all of this the connection hit home, how I didn’t just lose my love for my brother the day he died.  I lost myself.  How else could I have ended up that girl’s whipping post?  I lost the will to care how the winds blew around me, or what they brought.  For the past two years I’ve buried a part of me right along with Evan.  I thought I was doing it to spare my parents more pain, but now, I don’t know.  Because like I told Dylan, after Evan died and I took up with Em, I only felt good when I was in the Jam making music.  That’s it.

Dylan listened a while then asked, ‘So where are you now?’  I had to think on that a bit.  Until he asked, I didn’t realize I’d been talking about my past in third-person, like the guy all that stuff happened to was someone else.  I feel so different now, since that day in my truck with you.

I launched into how I’d gotten to where every time Em hurt me I blamed myself, like I deserved it or something.  I confessed I didn’t know how to confront her, or how to change.  I mean, I’d been taught you don’t hit girls.  I admitted it became easier to take her shit than put myself—and in my mind my parents—through what I thought would happen if I tried to get out.  Dylan said a lot of abused people convince themselves they deserve what they’re getting.  He said, ‘Your feelings make sense, but I’d say even when you were going through it, deep down, a part of you stayed in control.  That part has the power now.’

When I asked, ‘How do you figure that?’ Dylan’s answer earned his fee.  He said, ‘Kyle, I looked you up yesterday, on YouTube, after you told me about your music.  That’s where you’ve put yourself these past two years.  That young man is who you are.  Music protects your soul.  It’s your barrier, the line you’ve drawn around everything good about you.  What I want to know is who, or what, gave you the will to step beyond your Jam and risk the consequence of ending things with Em.  You could have told your parents about her a long time ago.  You didn’t.  So what happened, that gave you what you needed to change?’

I cried, then, like Dylan had up and given me an unexpected slap.  That guy has had to pry my heart with a crowbar to get me talking, and it’s taking a toll.  I’ll admit that except for when I told you about Evan and what happened with Em, I haven’t opened up to anyone since I can’t remember.  I’m shy that way, I guess.  Now though.  Dylan’s got my emotions running crazy, tender as a fawn in spring and just as undirected.  Today I cried because when he asked how I found what I needed to be free of Em I thought straight to the moment I saw you, wandering my mother’s yard sale in front of our house. Your hair was bunched in a knot and your body was hot as fire in shorts and a clingy tank.  You had an old pair of my boots tucked under your arm.  I stood at my bedroom window, gawking at the sight of you, a towel wrapped round my waist.  By the time I’d thought to wrangle back into my sweaty running shorts you were gone.

Then you walk in that first day of English wearing my boots, the heels painted up like sage.  You couldn’t know those boots were mine a long time back in grade school.  You couldn’t know how it made me feel to see them on your feet.  But I took it as a sign.  I swear, I was late to class for a week for how I followed you around, memorizing your schedule and where your locker is, watching you wander the world wearing a piece of me.  I wrote a song about it—the one on YouTube called
Wander
.  Did you recognize yourself in the lyrics?  I’ll tell you girl, more than half my songs are new, stuffed full of my feelings laid out plain and raw and just for you.

Since I’ve gone this far I may as well tell the whole story.  It’s not just my boots you own.  You’ve been collecting pieces of me: my attention and my heart, my everything.  That first day I saw you, Aspen.  Something in the sight of you made the sun rise inside me.  It’s a lot to lay on you, maybe.  But when I saw you I knew,
finally
, that I was still alive.

16

Journal Entry One
| Aspen Brand | AP English

My mom died
this year, on June third, but I don’t talk about it much.  I don’t like acknowledging her death.  But everything around me makes up for that.  Her death is why my dad and I moved to Gillette.  Her death is why I spent most of my summer unpacking.

I miss
my mom so much that I made a place for her, in a make-believe Portland, in my heart.  I’m not crazy or anything.  I know she’s gone.  It’s that I wish she wasn’t.

In Portland, where I come from, m
y mom and I had always created my school wardrobe from consignment stores and yard sales and thrift shops, plus Mom’s incredible talent as a seamstress.  So in August, once our house was put together, I carried on in her tradition as best I could.  I wandered out into Gillette, buying what I believed were a lot of great things to wear.  It was hard to go it alone, but the shopping had an unexpected side effect—it made me more comfortable with this place.  I figured out the town.  I began to feel at home. I was doing what I’d always done in summer and I felt closer to my mom, even though the shopping made me miss her, too.

But the
weirdest change in my life didn’t turn out to be my mother dying or moving away from the world I’d always known.  The weirdest change waited for me in Tower County High.  I started here a stranger, feeling lost and needing the comfort of school routine.  I expected I’d make friends easily.  That’s the way it was for new kids in my school back in Portland.  We lifers took them in.

Instead, and for the first time ever, I wound up on the receiving end of
a bully—a girl named Em Harrelson.

I got a little taste of
Em that first day in the school parking lot when she and her friends made fun of my name.  They’ve since made a game out of guessing who once owned my clothes—not that I believe there’s any way they really know so much about all the clothing up for sale in Gillette’s second-hand stores.  There’s other stuff, too, like when Em shoved me up against a locker and told me to stay away from Kyle Thacker.  And a few nights ago she threw marbles at my window just to scare me.  Which she did.

Growing up in the same place all your life affords you a kind of invisible safety-net. 
But until my first day of school in Tower County, I hadn’t realized that my net was gone.  I’d always been on the inside of things, looking out.  I’d always been the one who knew everybody, the one sheltered in a tight-knit group of family and friends.  I remember the few times I started acting like I was better because I was known or better because I came from a well-off part of town.  Mom would remind me: “No one is above or below you, Aspen.  Our differences make us equal.  Period.”

I arrived in Gillette having
lost everything but my dad.  My reception here shook what I’d been taught—I mean, my welcome was to be treated as if I’m nothing.  I’d never thought of myself as nothing before, even when Mom died.

If that’s
Gillette’s way, it makes me sad.  But I don’t accept it.  I’ve made a few good friends at Tower County: Gwen, and Kyle Thacker, too.  With luck, I’ll make more.

There aren’t many people here that know my
mom died, or how much I miss her.  Just Kyle, and Gwen and now you.  I don’t talk much about the things Em does, though I did finally tell my dad about the clothing game she plays.  And I haven’t told anyone that a change has happened inside me since moving here, a change I can’t yet explain.  Because despite Em’s rudeness and her bad behavior, despite being motherless and being so much on my own, this place feels part of me.  I would have never thought it possible as we drove out of Portland for the very last time.  Gillette is home.

At eleven forty the first lunch bell rings.  I walk from geometry into the hall, analyzing the dull pain in my ankle.  It’s not as bad as it was yesterday, and it’s much better than the night I fell.  The swelling’s gone down.  It’s easier now to get my boot—Kyle’s boot—on and off.

C
ool, how my boots were once his.

I
round a corner then stop short, inches from Em Harrelson.  I have no idea how she came to be right in front of me, though I’ll admit, I was looking elsewhere.  Kyle warned me that she can be a ghost.  Still, I feel a little freaked.

T
he classrooms to either side of us are full, and a few of the doors are propped open.  For half a second I consider diving into one of them, but I don’t.  Em hurt Kyle.  She hurt him in ways no one should ever be hurt.

“
Watch where you’re going, Retro.”

“My name is
Aspen,” I say.

Em
taps my arm with her finger.  “I hear you know where Kyle is.”

“
Don’t touch me.”

Em
cocks her head to one side and slowly twirls a shank of her dead-grass hair around her finger.  “I hear he rescued you a while back, out in the parking lot.”

“
That’s Lindsey’s view,” I say.

“No, I don’t think so.  You had Lindsey’s pin and she was asking for it and he stepped up for you.”

A group of guys wander past us, talking football.  When they’re gone the hall is empty—except for the sounds coming from the classrooms still in session.

I’m gripping my books so tight my
fingers ache.  At my core I’m shaking, but I say, “I buy my jewelry at stores.  Which is where I bought the pin Lindsey claims is hers.  And as for Kyle.  It’s a free country.”  I start to walk away, so angry I forgot my ankle hurts.  Until I put weight on it.

Em catches my arm
.  My books drop to the floor as she twists me to face her.  “Here’s the thing,” she says.  “Lindsey tells me a little story about you and a pin and the parking lot and Kyle.  The next thing I know, that
very same day
, in fact, he’s telling me we’re through.  He just followed me home from school and right there in my garage, broke my heart.  Everything was fine between us until the day he rescued you.  You see where I’m headed.”

I yank free of
Em’s grasp.  “If you really want the reason why he dumped you, I suggest you look in a mirror.”

Em shoves me
.  I stumble back, tripping over my books and bumping hard against the wall.  She drills her finger into my shoulder.  “Just what do you mean by that?” she shouts.  Two teachers step from their classrooms and stand in their open doorways, watching.  One of them folds his arms across his chest.  Em doesn’t notice either of them—or if she does, she doesn’t care.

“
I mean you’re not a nice person.  Both times I’ve run into you, you’ve shoved me up against some wall and yelled at me.  You don’t even
know
me.  But since I’m new here, I’ll spell it out for you.  Nothing about me is any of your business.  You don’t have the right to get in my face.  Stay away from me.”

Em’s
eyes widen and her lips part with a breathy “Huh.”  A few seconds pass like that, with her frozen and staring and me shaking inside, like my guts are trapped in a paint-mixing machine.  Then two creases form across her forehead.  Her mouth pulls into a sharp frown.  Her eyes twitch.

“Nobody talks to me like that,” she says
.  I swear she’s gritting her teeth.

“
Everybody should talk to you like that!  People should have started calling you on your crap when you were five.  You would have wound up better domesticated.”

Em’s
right hand curls into a fist.  She presses in on me until I’m smashed against the wall.  Our bony knees stab into each other.  Her breathing comes in puffs that smell like mint and something else, coffee, maybe.  “I totally hate you,” she whispers.

“
That doesn’t give you the right to bully me,” I say.

“
Is there a problem here?”  The teacher across the hall, the one with his arms folded, takes a single step toward us.  Like a burst sack of baby spiders, his class spills from the doorway behind him.

Em jumps away from me
as though I’m a live wire.  “This girl started yelling at me.  I don’t know why.  I was just on my way to lunch.”

“
I’ve been standing here a while,” the teacher says.

Em
shrugs.  She takes one step back, turns, and walks toward the lunchroom.

“Miss Harrelson,” the second teacher has her cell phone in her hand
.  She points in the opposite direction, toward the front of the building.  “Mr. McAddams is expecting you.  I’ll accompany you to his office.”

Em
stops.  She shoves her hands into the pockets of her black knit sweater and draws a deep, exaggerated breath.  Then she whirls on the heel of her boot.  As she moves past me, her eyes are flint and steel.  She mouths, so only I can see: “You’re dead.”